What card is good for desktop PC to hook DELL SC200?

Chia Plotting
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Bros. One of my friend says he can supply me a few DELL SC200 enclosure. What good PCI-e card do you suggest for tower computers, to chain these SC200? Rackmount Dell R stuffs are too noisy. I was thinking about it but after seeing them I think I stick with my HP Z stuffs. HP Z stuffs are quite and diehard. I will get a small rack for SC200 if they comes. Thanks!

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Dell PERC H700 SAS Controller - 6Gb/s SAS - PCI Express 2.0 x8 - Plug-in Card - RAID Supported - 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60 RAID Level - 8 SAS Port(s) - TechOnTime

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Its a place to start

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SC200 and SC220 Getting Started Guide (dell.com)

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Also just asking what size drives would you put into these units?

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I think one unit has 12 bays. Each has a 1TB.

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I need a card with external connector, no?

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This is the one I use: LSI 9200-8e 6Gbps 8-lane external SAS HBA P20 IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID NoROM | eBay

You can find them cheaper but that’s a great seller if you need help/support and it comes pre-flashed into IT mode so it will work great for lots of SC200’s daisy-chained together. I’ve got 15 of them in a rack all connected to this card through daisy chains and a single cable!

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Thanks for the reply bro. You mean single cable to one SC200 and from one SC200 to another SC200 there is another cable?

What OS do you use on your mother machine?

Also, SC200 “dual controller” what does it mean?

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Yes that’s right. A single SAS cable comes out of 1 of the 2 external ports of that card and then plugs into the “input” on the back of the SC200. Then another (much shorter) SAS cable (same type) comes out of the “output” on the back of that first SC200 and goes to the “input” on the next SC200, and so on. Very clean.

Windows Server 2019 but it should work for Linux as well

Each SC200 actually has two controller cards installed on the back between the two power supplies. Each controller card has the “input” and “output” ports I describe above. There are two of them for redundancy in case one of them fails. You could use the second port of that LSI controller host card and run another single daisy chain through all of the secondary controller cards in the SC200’s and this way you’d have automatic redundancy in case any one of the controller cards failed. But this isn’t as important with Chia of course. I just have a single port daisy-chained because I don’t need 100% uptime redundancy (although it in nice to have spare controller cards ready to go just in case).

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Thanks bro! for taking time answer my questions. I do very much need to rearrange my stuffs. Right now it is 0.5 PB. I think I am doing OK on noise control part, but stuffs are messy. Too much cable.

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Mr. 1PB bro, can I ask you a question?

This one

Does it use the same connection? It looks different.

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The SC200 is also an “MD1200” so MD3000 is just a newer model. The connection is a different type of SAS cable, but all the same concepts should apply! Here’s a lot more info about the SC200/MD1200: Fun with an MD1200/MD1220 & SC200/SC220 | ServeTheHome Forums

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I’d use either the 9200 that @enderTown suggested, or the selection that I decided to go with, a cheaper version of the 9200, a Dell H200e. Pretty sure it’s still LSI 2008 based also.

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What is the correct name for this external cable? IEEE number? Thanks bro.

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The h200e? It uses an 8088 cable.

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I had two SC220 (the 2.5" sized) Compellent disk shelves.
I used an IT mode flashed Dell H200E card, which had two external SFF-8088 ports.

You can use internal cards, but you might need some cabling adaptor to feed the Sff-8088 from the disk shelf into the case to the internal SFF-8087 on the card.

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From the research I did, I couldn’t really find any reason to flash the H200e’s. What was it that made you want to flash them? I just plugged mine in and they worked great.

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I didn’t flash the H200E, it was flashed when I bought it. What operating system are you using? I know some of these cards work in IT mode without flashing and some only work in IR mode and do not pass drives to the operating system without them being defined in hardware RAID.

I have a bunch of H200i Dell cards, the integrated slot type for Dell R-x15 series Poweredge machines (though these are just SAS2008 / 9211-8i cards without the brackets). I have flashed a bunch of these to IT mode. I will shortly be selling them but I am waiting on brackets, as most people will want to use them in pci-e slots as normal.